Crash is back for his first adventure on the sixth console generation!
What Is It? Crash Bandicoot The Wrath of Cortex (TWOC) is the first Crash Bandicoot game of the sixth generation and the first traditional Crash game not developed by Naughty Dog. No pressure! Traveller’s Tales takes over development duties, modern gamers might recognize them as the company who does the LEGO games. Prior to TWOC, they handled Sonic and Disney properties, among others, with Toy Story 2 being a personal standout as one of the better early 3D platforming collect-a-thons.
Doctor Neo Cortex is back again, this time he has his own Bandicoot to help; Crunch Bandicoot is a beefed up version of Crash. Cortex will use elemental masks to augment Crunch’s abilities in the boss fights to try to thwart Crash once and for all. Or something, I don’t really know, it’s a Crash Bandicoot game.
The game is set up nearly identically to Crash Warped: five different groups of levels, each with five levels followed by a boss fight. The core gameplay is the familiar 2.5D style; Crash can run in or out of the screen, jump and have limited movement in the left/right directions. Clear each of the five levels in an area by collecting the difficult to miss purple crystals, then beat the boss. Repeat four times and you will see the credits, all of this can be achieved in five or six hours.
Much like Warped, TWOC puts a heavy emphasis on doing things other than traditional Crash action-platforming. There are a bunch of minigame style levels here. Too many to name, but some highlights are “placed in a ball so you have to roll through the level”, a solid Jeep race, and a personal submarine. There are quite a few misses as well, such as a scooter, snowboard, and personal helicopter/jetpack. Many more fall somewhere in between, notably including a mech suit that has both fun and awful aspects.
The mixed bag of the mech suit holds for the majority of the game. It has many fun moments but also many forgettable moments. Some of the traditional levels are great, deftly swapping between perspectives to blend 2D side-scrolling platforming with the traditional Crash level structure. Not particularly memorable compared to the original trilogy, but still good and fun. It is when the game tries to veer off track where things can go wrong.
Crash’s sister Coco takes a few levels. This is fine, except she doesn’t have Crash’s moveset so it ends up just being an annoyance when the double jump you unlocked from beating a boss doesn’t work with her. There are a few flying levels, the controls are decent enough, but none of them are much fun because you just fly in circles holding down the shoot button to blast a few large objects. The game introduces a peach shooter late and then makes you use it to clear out things just on the edge of the screen, but the aiming is so clunky this quickly becomes annoying. Even some of the fun machines, such as the submarine, are hampered with poor level design at times.
You can see the credits merely getting the purple crystals and beating five bosses, but the game wants you to earn the special gems for each level, done by clearing them while destroying every box and additional gems can be earned through replaying levels in time trial mode. There is a lot of stuff to do here, but it involves playing the 25 levels many times to get right.
The Best Part: I appreciate that there are a handful of traditional Crash levels here. I will never turn down the chance to play through a good action-platformer and Crash is one of the best. The straightforward levels are mostly very good, some minor design choices aside, and it was fun, all of these years later, to get to experience new-to-me levels in that style.
The Worst Part: The boss fights. They just aren’t good. I will give credit to the final fight as it forces you to think and react quickly to dodge a bunch of attacks, but also ends pretty quickly. It was fun and satisfying to beat because I had to learn the patterns and then execute. The other boss fights, however, don’t hit this mark. They mostly feel like minigames, but not the fun kind. One of them has you rolling in a ball with the goal of running into rocks before Crunch does? Sure.
The Verdict: Crash Bandicoot The Wrath of Cortex is a perfectly mediocre sequel. They did a good job of picking up where Warped left off with its emphasis on minigames. I didn’t love that shift compared to the first two games, but I can’t deny that new devs behind TWOC did a good job carrying the series in the same direction. This game, to me, clearly isn’t as good as Warped, or the first two, because some of the levels are simply bad. Poor attempts at gimmicks lead to frustrating controls and an annoying experience. Here’s a hint: if you create an entire machine to move your character around for a full level and decide it isn’t good enough to reuse even once for the rest of the game; it is probably a pretty poorly designed mechanic!
This game has some definite lows, but it is also, generally, easy enough that you can move past them pretty quickly. This game is significantly easier than any of the original trilogy, so there is appeal in the form of a more approachable Crash game.
Despite the lows, this game definitely has some highs. Ultimately, I think Crash Bandicoot The Wrath of Cortex is worth playing today thanks to the volume of fun levels.
How to Play: PlayStation 2*, Xbox, GameCube
*console played on for this review
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